Wednesday, May 09, 2018

A Plea For Unrepresentative Democracy

David Runciman recently had this to say in the LRB about the way our democratic institutions are handling Brexit...

"Parliament has become a fundamentally unrepresentative body. The Brexit referendum revealed a country deeply divided on a number of measures that cut across party ties. One was age: the old, left as well as right, were far more likely to vote for Brexit than the young. But another division, just as pronounced, was education: whether or not someone had gone to university was one of strongest indicators of voting behaviour in the referendum (just under 70 per cent of university graduates voted Remain). Yet a degree has become something close to an entry requirement for a political career at Westminster. A large majority of MPs are now graduates (with only a few exceptions, the Brexit-sympathising Corbyn being one), along with a near monopoly of their advisers and civil servants. On many questions – health, housing, welfare, education itself, even fox-hunting – this might not matter because public opinion divides on grounds other than education. But on Brexit it means Parliament risks making a judgment it is not democratically qualified to make because it doesn’t represent the diversity of public opinion."

This troubles me somewhat. I think we'd all like Parliament to be more 'representative' in the sense that there should surely be more women and minority MPs, but this stream of good intentions may also be confusing us as to the true nature of parliamentary democracy. As far as I am concerned, it does not exist in order to give a fairly-weighted hearing to uninformed, scatterbrained policy ideas.Suppose there was a viral outbreak which significantly reduced the IQ of up to a third of the population. Would elected bodies be obliged in some way to reflect this demographic dumbing down? Regrettably, this seems to be the way we are heading even without the assistance of microbes...